Quote:
Originally Posted by ThaVirus
"That is one big pile of shit"?
So I was watching the video on another site and one of the comments with a fair amount of up votes declared that this is fake because "when they find stuff like this they never include photos". Someone in this thread earlier mentioned the system being 39-40 light years away.
So, I'm assuming we don't have pictures because either it's too far and we can't actually see the planets or they'd just look like little bright dots in a black back drop. Is that correct? Also, the woman in the video mentioned that she couldn't believe the find but that "the data was all there". So maybe we don't even actually see the planets but can tell they're there through other means, like gravity in the area perhaps?
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We don't have telescopes anywhere near good enough to get a picture of one of these planets. See the recent flyby of Pluto to give you an idea of how grainy our Earth-bound telescopes even for a planet that's in our own neighborhood.
The way they find this stuff is by measuring the light that a star puts off and looking for periods when the light dims from that star (when a planet crosses in front of it). By measuring the magnitude of the dimming and the frequency at which the light dims in the same way, they can get a feel for how big the planet is that caused it and how long its orbit is.
Taking it a step further, different compounds cause the light to dim in different ways. That's where the JWST comes in. It should be able to give us an idea of what compounds are present in the atmosphere of these planets. Mostly, we're looking for oxygen. If we find oxygen, it's highly likely that there is at least SOME form of life there.